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Tuesday, 29 December 2015

Israel’s Advocacy: Toward a Better Future.

Transcript of Barry Shaw’s address to
the Haifa University Conference on “Rethinking the Challenges of Israel’s PR.”

A warning! I don’t come from an
academic, media or political background. My grounding is in business. I tend to
see things in stark black and white reality. I also originate from Lancashire
in the north of England where we employ straight talking. It’s where we call a
spade a “bloody shovel.”

I’ve been asked to talk about rethinking
Israel’s PR and the establishment of an independent advocacy body and they’ve
only given me fifteen minutes. That’s like mission impossible, but I’ll give it
a shot.

This conference would have a missing
heart if we didn’t talk about you and your valuable contribution to Israel’s
hasbara.

It is because of you we had to move this event into a larger
hall.

You came because you live and breathe defending Israel on a
daily basis.

You do it because you expect the government to protect and
defend us. This includes protecting and defending us from the accusations, the
slanders, the demonization and the intimidation that threaten us.

They have failed to do that.

This has led us to pick up the weapons at our disposal and
lead the fight back against the Israel bashers. We do that on various battlefronts – law,
diplomacy, academia, media are just some of them.

They have failed us, and they have
failed our friends abroad, the ones who have been on the frontline of this
battle for decades.

We have to ask ourselves why?

In fairness, I think it’s because government
is there to deal with diplomacy.

Diplomacy means government to government,
government to governmental institutions, UN and EU, inter-parliamentary bodies.

They’ll be the first to tell you, if
truth be told, that they are not there to dabble in other countries internal
affairs.

That would be undiplomatic.

As such, they abandon our supporters
who are left alone, relying only on us to help them.

The government is nowhere to be seen when
the editorial line of much of the western media is perpetually pumping out
anti-Israel imagery and lies that favor Hamas over IDF, or Palestinian lies
over Israeli truth.

The government is not there when demonstrators
take to the streets and we see our supporters rally to counter the hate, or to
counter the BDS activists demonstrating outside stores selling Israeli products
in Europe and in South Africa.

The government was nowhere to be seen
when we warned them about the coming EU labeling of Jewish products and how it
was possible then to prevent it.

I brought a team from UK Lawyers for Israel
to sit with government officials a year ago. Each presented ways to tackle
boycotts, sanctions and even labeling. The officials did nothing and look where
we are today with the EU labeling sanctions.

They weren’t there to deal with the
rise of BDS, or the anti-Israel hate machine being generated on campuses.

We have a government that does little
to protect our students and campus supporters who are struggling against
well-funded, well organized intimidators and slanderers who feel they own the
campus.

They are not there to prevent or
challenge annual Israel Apartheid Week rituals or boycott resolutions, or when
our students or our diplomats are intimidated and prevented from speaking.

And when they do step out of their
formal environment of governmental diplomacy, they do it badly.

A couple of weeks ago we saw Yair Lapid
handing out leaflets at Ben Gurion airport to Israelis flying abroad.

What on earth was that about! It’s was a gimmick, a publicity stunt.

Here’s what he said to the press;

“We can no longer abandon this battle
to the haters of Israel. The time has come to answer them.”

By his saying that “we can no
longer abandon this battle” indicates that they had abandoned the battle.

In truth, the world has changed. In
our advocacy work we see what I call called ‘the uberization of public
diplomacy.’

What is the uberization of public
diplomacy?

Today, the public is attracted to the Uber initiative of choosing private transportation over conventional taxi and
bus services. They are also prefer the advocacy of independent groups to
government or more convention leadership. We are seeing have linked up to anti-Israel
messaging transmitted on the campus, in the media, and elsewhere, by less formal
groups.

So it’s private diplomacy, not
government diplomacy, which sways the hearts and minds of public
opinion. It is the hyper-active group initiatives that are driving the
messaging against us - of which BDS is the one that most readily grabs our
attention.

Professor Irwin Cotler spoke
eloquently about incitement to genocide being an international crime. BDS is
conducting a benign genocide when it calls for the elimination of Israel.

It takes a network to defeat a
network - and we don’t have a network.

To prove my point, in the UK, the National
Union of Students just produced a 92 page BDS campaign booklet. The foreword
includes the following;

“The campaign for BDS will not be won
in NUC meetings. It will not even be won at national conferences, despite the
importance of these bodies. The BDS campaign will be won when across the UK
when institutions refuse to collaborate with Israeli institutions.”

In stark terms this is the battle we
must fight and win!

We must abandon conventional methods
that have failed to dent the attacks against us. We need to be creative. We
need to think out of the box.

So this is where you have your say. My vision is derived from what you have told
me and from what I see from my own experience.

We must create a new central advocacy
body, outside of government, to vastly improve and coordinate our advocacy
efforts to better effect.

This center must empower the many NGOs
and groups with proven track records already doing excellent work. They need
our help and can do even better with the right resources and with a central
coordination to integrate and accelerate their work.

Yair Lapid called for an organization
to fight the Israel haters. He’s right. We should take him up on that demand.

We have people like you fighting our cause,
fighting for us on various battlefields on a daily basis.

Lapid spoke about a battle. He was
right. We are in a war for the future of Israel. We are individuals doing
amazing work on various battlefronts such as those selected here – media,
academia, law, diplomacy.

We are under-staffed,
under-resourced, but we are ideally positioned to win important battles,
battles than the government shouldn’t get involved in. They are the daily
public opinion, person-to-person, group-to-group battles that sometimes must be
fought undiplomatically.

We need to go on the offensive, to
take the fight to our enemies - and those who misguidedly support our enemies –
in a more coordinated way.

To fight against those who are
harming us in the media, academia, and even foreign governments that finances
much of the campaigns against us.

We have to censure a media that
presents us in a way that we hardly recognize ourselves.

We need an organization that can
build a network that can win the battles in the hubs of delegitimization.

It takes a network to defeat a
network and this cannot be done at government level.

In military terms, our problem is
that we are fighting as individual warriors or small specialist teams, each
fighting our own battles independently against a well-funded, well-coordinated
enemy with an integrated message.

We are alone on the battlefield while
they have captured valuable territory – campus, media, even influencing their
governments.

The weapons of our arguments are the
right ones but we, as separate units, are simply overwhelmed, out-gunned by the
growing fire power ranged against us.

Our individual efforts can be far
more effective if we are united and coordinated into one control center – an
advocacy command and control center, if you will.

The IDF is made up of an army, an air
force, a navy. People are recruited to serve in different units but all come
together under a central command that deploys the various units, whose job it
is to improve the effectiveness of these elite fighting units, to coordinate
their use according to battle conditions to achieve victories that will defeat,
deplete or demoralize the enemy.

Let me give you a few examples of
where a coordinated response wins battles.

I have seen the effective application
of law help students who felt isolated and defeated win counterclaims on
campuses in the UK and in South Africa.

I have seen where lawyers have forced
the media to back down and publicly apologize for false reporting.

I have experienced where information
brought in by students at IDC Herzlia as part of their work in the advocacy room
fighting against the 2011 Gaza flotilla prevent a BDS plan to fly hundreds of
anti-Israel activists into Israel to cause disruptions at Ben Gurion airport
with demonstrations.

They called it the “flightilla”. The BDS plan
utterly failed.

Why did the ships in the 2011
flotilla fail to leave port and sail to Gaza?

Time doesn’t permit me to give you
the details. The short answer is that UK Lawyers for Israel and Shurat Hadin
prevented the Gaza flotilla ships from leaving the Greek port of Pireaus. Compare
that to the Mavi Marmara PR disaster of the previous year.

These are just a few instances where
effective coordinated actions have won major battles for us.

I know that many of you have similar
stories to share.

Think how much more effective we
could be if we had a fully functioning advocacy body manned by proven leaders
with successful track records, organizational and communication skills,
motivational and logistical support abilities, and with influential global
connections.

This surely has to be the way
forward.

Can this model succeed? Yes. This is
the model we must aspire to, led by talented men and women of action dedicated
to Israel and not to personal vanities.

It should be headed by an elite
honorary board made up of global figures who share a strong affirmative love of
Israel.

It should be manned by an executive
branch that will coordinate a plan of action to create an integrated support
system in the fields we are discussing today.

This executive will lay the
foundation and appoint directors and managers both in Israel and abroad who
will work with existing NGOs and set up new ones where there is a need.

Basically, we should copy the best
examples of global corporate structures. That’s why, with respect, business
executives are better placed to succeed than politicians and academics. They
know how to raise capital & operate corporate structures efficiently.

We must be everywhere, every day – a
constant multi-headed presence.

It takes a network to defeat a
network.

Haifa must be the first step on the
road to achieving the goal of establishing a much needed independent advocacy
central organization.

Today’s conference cannot be a stand-alone
event. It’s too important an issue. This
has to be the beginning and we need your help.

We need more of you to have your say
on how the future of our public diplomacy & advocacy should look going
forward.

You put your heart and soul into our
efforts and i for one value your contribution.

So there you have it, how to face the
challenges and create a better advocacy future in fifteen minutes.

Thank you.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate
for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas,
BDS and Anti-Semitism’ and ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.barrysbooks.info